Mainstream news acting all shocked by this guy when the rest of us here on the internet have heard right-wing fanatics spout shit like this for years and years under the laughably fake bullshit excuse of “trolling.”
counterpunches: theroguefeminist: gentlyepigrams: blackness-by-your-side: my utopia The drag queen from this photo has spoken up about the photo. I won’t speak for all liberals, but I’d like to see a future where it isn’t a big deal for a woman … Continue reading →
My dad told me recently that the most important public health workers are garbage collectors and janitors. So much of our health relies on a clean environment. These people do some of the most important work in society. If we learned in dirty public environments full of garbage, we’d all be sick. I cannot thank these people enough for the valuable work that they do.
I’ve coined a new term for the gallows humor that my generation indulges in because we have an overheating planet, a dim political future, a crushing economy, and a real avocado toast problem:
as a general rule. if what we’re calling ‘cultural appropriation’ sounds like nazi ideology (i.e. ‘white people should only do white people things and black people should only do black people things’) with progressive language, we are performing a very very poor application of what ‘cultural appropriation’ means. this is troublingly popular in the blogosphere right now and i think we all need to be more critical of what it is we may be saying or implying, even unintentionally.
There is nothing wrong with everyone enjoying each other’s cultures so long as those cultures have been shared.
Eating Chinese food, watching Bollywood movies, going to see Cambodian dancers, or learning to speak Korean so you can watch every K drama in existence is totally fine. The invitation to participate in those things came from within those cultures. The Mexican family that owns the place where I get fajitas wants me to eat fajitas. Their whole business model kind of depends on it, actually.
If you see something from another culture you think you might want to participate in, but you don’t know if that would be disrespectful or appropriative, you can just…ask. Like. A Jewish friend explained what a mezuzah was to me, recently. (It’s the little scroll-thing near their front doors that they touch when they come into their house. It basically means “this is a Jewish household.”)
“Oh, cool,” I said. “Can I touch it? Or is it only for Jewish people?”
“You can touch it or you can not touch it,” she said. “I don’t care.”
“Cool, I’m gonna touch it, then.”
“Cool.”
It’s not hard.
You want to twerk, twerk. I’ve never heard a black person say they didn’t think anybody else should be allowed to twerk. Just that they want us to acknowledge that they invented that shit, not Miley fucking Cyrus.
this is a good post.
Thank you, I was trying to sort this out in my head but you explained it very well.
This. When I was a kid, there would be roadside tourist traps that sold “Indian” jewelry and clothes that were Made in Taiwan (good LORD shows how old I am) and even my family knew to not buy that crap. But when vendors from the area Choctaws would have booths at the folklife festivals selling authentic wares, they WANTED us to. It was a sharing of their culture and the money went back to native families. The same when my dad visited Oklahoma; he brought back art made and sold by Cherokee artists.
This is not a tumblr. 